Your Call Is Important To Us (29 page)

The right’s latest poster boy for the radical corruption of academe is a real doozy, a Colorado professor of ethnic studies named Ward Churchill, who does not have a PhD, and who might be a fake American Indian. Churchill wrote an essay after 9–11 that referred to the victims of the WTC attack as “little Eichmanns.” Bad taste? Certainly. But the pro-life movement has been taking the Holocaust’s name in vain for years; tenured radicals do not have the monopoly on bogus Nazi comparisons. When O’Reilly and the gang got their hands on the offending essay in 2005, years after it was published, Churchill became the symbol of everything wrong with tenure and the professoriate in general. The right let out a mighty hue and cry. We pay those traitors’ salaries! And they have our children!

As someone who has spent her whole life in academia, let me say that the right wing’s claims are, as usual, exaggerated. Humanities faculties may skew left of the current American political dial, but the Ward Churchills are few and far between. And if you take a walk over to the business or law schools, you will find plenty of conservative hatchlings. Universities don’t have the time and resources to be Marxist indoctrination camps. Most professors are far, far too busy trying to teach skills like essay writing, which students did not learn in their underfunded high schools, to foment the rise of the revolutionary proletariat. But this vilification of universities by the right is already starting to affect their own children’s education. A colleague who had the pleasure of teaching in the American South told me his students said that their ministers and parents had warned them about university professors and their wicked ways. They were supposed to keep their heads down, get good grades, and not listen to the liberal claptrap. If you check out a right-wing message board like Free Republic, you will see the same advice. Until the university changes and expresses the right’s worldview, the kids of cons are encouraged to detach themselves from the educational experience. This advice is about as anti-intellectual as it gets.

This right-wing incursion into university politics is disturbing because education is our only hope. I know I said I wasn’t going to offer any solutions. But if there is one thing that can stem the tide of bullshit or reduce its deleterious effects, it is a critical and well-educated populace that knows its own language well enough to know when that language is being abused and misused. Education also helps facilitate income mobility, combating the erosion of the middle class. Even Bush says so. When, in the debates, the president was asked about income inequality, he immediately began talking about education programs like No Child Left Behind as a corrective. This was a classic Bush swerve away from a question he cannot answer, but there was a grain of truth in it. Education does help people move on up, provided they can afford the cover charge at the door, which is getting steeper and more onerous. Bush’s rhetoric on education is nice, but his policies have been underfunded and wrongheaded, pushing teachers to teach to standardized tests. This kind of test-based curriculum is precisely why I have to teach eighteen-year-olds how to write complete sentences.When people cannot own and operate their own language, they are that much more susceptible to bullshit.

The bullshit pandemic is not a mystery. We are under the rule of pusillanimous, self-serving prevaricators, and thus, pusillanimous, self-serving prevarication is the rule. There’s more shame and misery in being broke than in being fake. Why not bullshit? If it’s good enough for the captains of industry, the titans of politics, the Catholic church, the medical establishment, and the media, then it’s good enough for you.

Let’s look at the tally.

It’s bullshit that private interests have eclipsed public goods.

It’s bullshit that companies devote more time and money to telling us how great they are, or how desperately we need them, than to simply providing quality products and services.

It’s bullshit that the fruits of the boom went largely to the richest of the rich, and that the poor were once again left sucking the mop.

It’s bullshit that the law treats corporations as people, and allows artificial people to get away with things that real people would never even dream of doing. Increased wealth concentration and growing corporate power are the result of deregulation and generous tax policies, which can be attributed to the best government the big-money lobbies can buy. And the fact that government is bought and paid for by the fortunate few means that the rest of us do not trust politicians or engage in the political process.

It’s bullshit that pharmaceutical companies and the insurance industry have succeeded in privatizing public issues, like access to health care, and turning them into very valuable cash cows. Major retailers and other service industry titans go on and on like it’s all about you, the almighty customer, but they are far more interested in their bottom line than the time you spend holding the line, listening to the titular blah-dee-blah.

It’s bullshit that discount shopping and phone service are how we will spend our time and money, and that serving and waiting are our glorious employment future.

It’s bullshit that so much of the news is so resolutely newsless, particularly in a time when we are suffering no shortage of newsworthy—dare I even haul out a dusty Hegelianism like world-historical?—events.

Even as I shake my tiny fist, I dig my comfy couch, my big TV, my salty snacks, and all the other accoutrements of my plush and cushy First World life. It’s just that my eyebrows are plum tuckered out from all the arching, and my peepers are strained from persistent rolling. I am weary of responding to the news in the negative double affirmative: “Yeah, right.” No ad campaign, no wonder pill, no blockbuster movie, no celebrity, no candidate, no entertainment complex, no glorious blandishment can compensate for a lack of trust and the sense that all is a scam or a sham, for the feeling that one is being fooled and fobbed off. Neat stuff and air-conditioned comfort are pleasing, but must they come at the cost of this fog of fibs? Does our prosperity really depend on an edifice of phoniness, erected by the fortunate few in their best interests? I don’t think so. Nevertheless, ads fudge and fake, companies overstate and omit, governments euphemize and evade, the media distort and dumb down, and we are exhorted to smile and shrug and return to our regularly scheduled shiny things.

One of the dangers of writing a book such as this, besides its unendability, is that one is invariably warbling to the choir, or at least for fellow musicians. If you picked up this book, you were probably a little pissed off already. You, Gentle Reader, are probably not one of the powerful malefactors of great bullshit, so all of this huffing and puffing is kind of like chastising kids for poor attendance at school. The kids who are congenitally un-there aren’t around to hear you chew them out.

But in the event you are a perpetrator (and you know in your heart of hearts if you are), I say unto you: Shame. Shame! Have you no sense of decency? You take names in vain, and send legions of vain names into the world. And when you fuck with English, you are money-changing in my temple.

This book is the fruit of many hours of Googling, and of consulting a host of government and policy-wonk databases, reading newspapers, and looking at recent nonfiction books. I am deeply indebted to many fine researchers and publications. Web links are operative as of March 2005. The italicized phrase at the beginning of each citation refers to a key fact or idea in the chapter specified, and may not be an exact quotation from the text.

CHAPTER ONE

2  message discipline: Mark McKinnon, quoted in Jake Tapper, “Ari: Gone but Not Forgotten,” Salon. com, May 19, 2003; online at
www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/19/ari/
.

2  
Burson-Marsteller:
Their Web address is
www.bm.com
.

5  
Harry Frankfurt:
See Harry Frankfurt,
On Bullshit
(Princeton University Press, 2005).

9  
Bullfighter:
Deloitte & Touche are no longer associated with Bullfighter, which can now be downloaded at
www.fightthebull.com
. See Jonathan Glater, “Holy Change Agent! Consultants Edit Out Jargon,”
The New York Times,
June 14, 2003.

CHAPTER TWO

21  
Total U.S. ad spending:
Figures come from Robert J. Coen’s
Insider’s Report,
produced by the Universal McCann agency. The most recent report is available online at
www.universalmccann.com/Insiders1204.pdf
.

21  
global PR revenues:
PR revenue figures come from the Council of Public Relations Firms, online at
www.prfirms.org/resources/rankings/2002_rankings.asp
.

24  
Bill Hicks:
His scathing monologue against advertisers and marketers is from his 1992 show,
Revelations,
available on a DVD released by Rykodisc in 2004,
Bill Hicks Live.

25  
Trojan horse of sweet melody:
See Nat Ives, “Marketing Meets Anti-Establishment Music,”
The New York Times,
November 6, 2002.

26  
TiVo pop-ups:
See Jefferson Graham and Michelle Kessler, “Ads to Pop Up When TiVo Users Scan Past Commercials,”
USA Today,
November 18, 2004.

27  
letter to John Lahr:
The lengthy anti-censorship letter appears in
Love All the People: Lyrics, Letters, Routines
(Soft Skull Press, 2004.)

28  
shift from ads to PR:
See Al and Laura Ries,
The Fall of Advertising and Rise of PR
(HarperBusiness, 2002).

28  
Credibility Index:
The index is online at
www.prsa.org/_About/prsafoundation/nciIndex.asp?ident=prsa0
.

29  
Code of Ethics:
The Code of Ethics is available at
www.prsa.org/_About/ethics/pledge.asp?ident=eth6
. A preamble notes that emphasis on enforcement of this code has been eliminated, and describes the pledge as a useful guide.

29  
Burson-Marsteller clients:
From Conal Walsh, “Fur Flies as Greenpeace Grandee Takes PR Shilling,”
The Guardian,
January 13, 2002, business section.

30  
History of U.S. advertising:
See Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising
(Basic Books, 1995).

30  
History of PR:
See Stuart Ewen,
PR! A Social History of Spin
(Basic Books, 1998).

31–33
Edward Bernays:
My account is based on Larry Tye’s excellent biography,
The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations
(Crown, 1998).

33  
Propaganda:
Bernays’s book has been reissued with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller (Ig Publishing, 2004).

34  
The Silver Anvil Award:
Case studies for winners from 2000 to present are available at
www.prsa.org/_Awards/silver/index.asp?ident=sil0
.

39  
Front groups and astroturfing:
See
www.prwatch.org
, and John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton,
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry
(Common Courage Press, 1995).

40  
Medialink:
Their website has been revamped and now touts “the spirit to turn promises into reality” at
www.medialink.com/mdlkRela.htm
.

40  
pro-Bush letter to the editor:
See “Stupid Papers and GOP Astroturf,” at
Daily Kos,
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; online at dailykos.com/story/2004/8/17/17029/2550.

40  
Office of National Drug Control Policy:
The Government Accountability Office chastised the ONDCP for the VNRs and using the term Drug Czar. The GAO report is online at
www.gao.gov/decisions/appro/303495.htm
.